Plays well in Voyager
Cool, makes it much easier to visualize how living on a spinning globe works.
This makes me feel tiny
If you haven’t seen the Milky way with your own eyes, it’s shrink factor is unreal. I’ve seen lots of panoramas and kind of saw dustiness in the sky, but I’ll never forget the shock of the first time I could identify elements. I had a wide angle camera and was trying to get into astrophotography. I took just one, short, high ISO shot. Surprise to me, I got it. I caught the Milky way and could see some structures in the pic, such as the dark horse nebula (which I prefer to call the slug head). And then I looked up and the scene hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s huge. Mathematically it makes sense, it’s all around us and panoramas use 90+° lenses, so of course a pano on the horizon is going to be looking straight up, too. But none of that logic applied until I saw it, wrapped overhead.
We are tiny.
It’s a great big universe And we’re all really puny We’re just tiny little specks About the size of Mickey Rooney It’s big and black and inky And we are small and dinky It’s a big universe, and we’re not!
- Yakko’s Universe
I was curious if this was based on a low winter sun at a polar attitude, but it’s not. The location in Chile is only 24°S (Miami is 25°N) and the nightfall timing makes me think this mid-November. That puts the sun in the frame for half the span of the day frames. So instead of being a cool example of a weak sun as I thought, someone spent 3x as much effort to simulate the placement of celestial objects to exemplify how we are just a little rock spinning in space. The stars don’t come out at night, the day just hides them. We’re always sitting under the stars. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2849/
And actually, given that that xkcd was posted Nov 1, I can’t help but wonder if it’s related.
